Soccer Fan Mutinies, All Over England

Image

Fans of Blackburn with banners protesting Venky’s, the Indian poultry conglomerate controlled by the club’s owners, the Rao family.CreditNathan Stirk/Getty Images

By Rory Smith

Jan. 27, 2017

Around midday on Saturday, 50 or so dedicated Blackpool fans will board a bus that will take them to Blackburn. They will be decked out with flags and banners, all in the club’s distinctive bright orange.

It is a short journey — 25 miles or so, about an hour’s drive — and a big game. Both clubs are enduring difficult seasons: Blackburn Rovers are 23rd of 24 teams in the Championship, flirting with relegation to the third tier; Blackpool, a Premier League team only six years ago, is now in the middle of the pack in League Two, the bottom rung of English soccer’s league system.

Victory offers respite: a place in the fifth round of the F.A. Cup, a chance to rub shoulders with the game’s modern giants, to escape the humdrum reality of the everyday. Saturday should be a day to start a romance.

When those fans step off their bus, though, onto the tight, terraced street that flanks Ewood Park, they will do so thinking only about divorce. They will walk to the gates of the stadium, and they will stop. They will be joined by a couple of hundred more Blackpool fans, and perhaps a couple of thousand Blackburn supporters. They will not cheer on their teams. Instead, they will support their clubs by standing outside, united in defiance.

“It will be the first game I have missed for years,” said Mark Fish, the chairman of the Blackburn Rovers Action Group. He has traveled to matches home and away for two decades. On Saturday, he said, he will be among those outside. “It will be hard,” he added. “But the owners will use the number of people inside as a way to counteract the message we want to get out, and I can’t countenance adding to that.”

Image

Blackpool supporters taking aim at the team’s owner, Karl Oyston. The club, part of the Premier League just six years ago, has fallen to English soccer’s bottom tier.CreditStephen Pond/Getty Images

The message, for Fish and his group, is that Blackburn’s owners — the Rao family, proprietors of Venky’s, an Indian poultry conglomerate — are no longer welcome. The Raos stand accused, in Fish’s words, of “destroying” the club they bought in 2010, thanks to a series of what he called “disastrous decisions and empty promises.”

On the field, Blackburn has slumped from being a “well-performing Premier League team” to finding itself on the cusp of demotion to England’s third tier; off it, attendance has collapsed, with fewer than 10,000 fans turning up for one recent match against Brighton. In 2000, during a previous spell outside the Premier League, twice that number regularly came to watch Rovers play.

The disaffection, the fans said, can be traced not just to poor performances but to disdain for the owners: the lack of investment, the absence of communication, the dearth of direction. The Rao family has not attended a game at Ewood Park for three years, Fish said. He and his group send letters to the Raos’ base in Pune, India, twice a month, trying to open a dialogue. “We have never had a response,” he said.

The fans feel abandoned, overlooked; the dwindling crowds suggest they have even started to drift away from the club. “You will lose a generation, who never have chance to fall in love with Blackburn,” Fish said. “Kids will think of football as a TV show.”

If anything, the situation is even more toxic at Blackpool. It started with fans accusing the club’s owner, Karl Oyston, of using some of the funds raised from a season in the Premier League to prop up his other businesses, and it has descended from there. In 2014, fans intentionally delayed a televised game against Burnley by throwing tennis balls and tangerines onto the field at the club’s Bloomfield Road stadium.

Image

Charlton Athletic fans have grown so upset with the club’s Belgian owner, Roland Duchatelet, that they staged a mock funeral for the team in March.CreditRex Features, via Associated Press

Since then, a campaign called “Not a Penny More” has been running for years, aimed squarely at forcing out Oyston by reducing attendance to an unsustainable level.

Its effect has been startling: Blackpool has attracted more than 4,000 fans only once this season. There have been field invasions and protests, and an “alternative” home jersey was released to ensure fans did not have to pay for the official version. Fans who have held their season tickets for decades — some for a half-century or more — have given them up.

Oyston has responded in kind: banning the local newspaper from the club and starting litigation against a number of supporters. A representative of the Tangerine Knights, a supporters’ group, declined to speak on the record because of the threat of legal reprisals from Oyston.

But while Blackburn and Blackpool are particularly virulent examples of what happens when the relationship between a club and its fans breaks down, they are far from the only ones.

Protests are not isolated to England, of course — fans of the Spanish club Valencia are currently demonstrating against that team’s owner, Peter Lim, and Italian ultras refuse to attend games with reasonableregularity to protest unpopular decisions — but the level of unrest among fans here is striking. English soccer, in many ways, is in its golden age: richer than it has ever been, riding a wave of global popularity, convinced of its own success.

And yet, in recent months alone, there have been demonstrations at Coventry City, Leyton Orient, Nottingham Forest and Leeds United.

Fans of Charlton Athletic have been protesting against its Belgian owner, Roland Duchatelet, almost since his arrival. At one point, they even staged a mock funeral for their club.

Once again, Duchatelet is largely absent; once again, the disdain for the fans is not even thinly veiled. “He called us stupid in December,” said Steve Clarke, vice president of the Charlton Athletic Supporters’ Trust. “When we complain, we are told we are wrong. There is an almost Trump-like denial of the facts.”

The facts, as elsewhere, are that results have been poor and attendance is slipping. In more and more places, fans feel so detached, so alienated, that they come unmoored entirely.

The phenomenon is not unique to the lower tiers: In the Premier League, Hull City fans have spent much of the season protesting their team’s owner, Assem Allam. “Initially, his unpopularity was because he wanted to rename the club,” said Geoff Bielby of the Hull City Supporters’ Trust. The current protests, though, are more related to a change in ticket pricing. “He has overseen two promotions and an F.A. Cup final,” Bielby said, “and he’s still managed to be unpopular.”

The anger, though, spreads higher. At Blackburn, as at Blackpool, Charlton, Hull and so many other places up and down England, much of the blame is apportioned to the country’s soccer authorities, accused of failing to protect clubs from owners without their best interests at heart. Blackpool’s Tangerine Knights want club owners to be assessed annually to check that they are taking care of the institutions they curate. At Blackburn, they would like to see something broader still.

“We want a full inquiry into how football clubs are run,” said Fish, the Blackburn fan. “This is a pattern. It is an infection that the Football Association, the Premier League and the Football League have done absolutely nothing to cure.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Mutinies by Fans, All Over England. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe